Tag Archives: markus zusak

Last year Heather and I worked through a process of researching and then reading a book with our grade seven and eight classes that was a new way of doing things. Building our community and then moving the kids closer together, we had our students use a number of platforms (wordpress blogs, google docs, chatrooms, online sticky notes, etc) to conduct a lot of research in online spaces.

While we definitely did a lot of planning ahead of time, when the rubber actually hit the road, things often changed and we found ourselves inventing new practices on the fly; taking the time to reflect on things afterwards, we grew a pedagogy of students working in community, on multiple platforms, to accomplish a variety of goals.

I was reminded about the power of what we did and the changes we had to make personally when I had a student teacher in my room for a few classes. She was in while the students in our class were deep into writing the Field Guide to Molching that formed a pivotal part of our work with Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief. At that time, Heather and I were often spending 50+ minutes each day in dead silent classrooms while 10+ groups of students each on their own google doc furiously researched and wrote. We found ourselves jumping in between chatrooms, supporting students in their learning, asking critical questions, editing along side of students and providing additional information when needed. The speed at which we worked was simply something I took for granted. But when a student teacher came for a few days to see what we were doing out of interest, I had to coach her along and get her working at a much higher speed then she was used to. It made me realize that we were doing things differently.

I have been reminded about that over the last few days. Once again, Heather and I have teamed up to begin reading a book between our classes. Eventually, we are going to be taking turns reading over skype, while the kids write in a chatroom and then spend some time in reflection at the end of each session. But before then, the kids need to do some background research and initial learning. The book we are reading is Half Brother, written by Canadian author Kenneth Oppel. A great book (based on a true story) about a family in the 1970s who attempt to raise a chimpanzee as if it were a human child. We wanted our students to look at such things as sign language, animal research, the theory of evolution and other topics as background work.

So we’ve set them to work.

Groups of four or five students each have a google document as a planning space. Each group has students from Heather’s school and students from mine. They are collaborating on planning, doing their research, and then heading towards the completion of a presentation which they will deliver to both classes.

But we’ve been amazed the last few days at what we are finding between our groups of students. Heather and I both have classes that have students in grade seven and eight in them. This means that our grade eights were with us last year as we worked through The Book Thief, while our sevens are rookies to this kind of work. We were amazed and impressed at the maturity and experience that many of our eights brought to this task. They quickly jumped in, organized themselves and the grade sevens, asked questions freely in chatrooms and set up research sub titles and guiding questions on their documents. From the intense experience they were through last year, they know what to do and the process they need to work through in order to be effective learners in online spaces.

I am interested to see where the grade eights progress to as they gain more experience working this way. I am also wondering how the guidance that the grade eight students provide to the grade sevens will help them to get up to speed with this type of learning. Last year we were all rookies building and learning as we went along. What happens when mentors come in to play?

As one of my grade eight students told me when I spoke to them about this after today’s session, “That’s right Mr. Fisher, we’ve got skillz.”

I don’t usually take the time to complain about technology. Things work… or they don’t.

But this morning I’m downright angry, extremely sad and disappointed for the kids in my classroom for the second time in a few weeks.

Skype has always been one of the great additions to my classroom. It has brought us connections from across the globe over years. We’ve learned to make photostories from David Jakes in Chicago, talked to classrooms in Los Angeles, on Long Island, in South America and in Asia. This year we’ve had an almost daily call with our Idea hive partners in Ontario. We’ve had Silvia Tolvisano teach us valuable lessons about cristallnacht and world war 2. Countless connections.

But in the last several weeks we’ve had two “mission critical” failures from this cornerstone technology:

1.) We’ve worked hard for months with our partners in Ontario in Heather Durnin’s class on Markus Zusak’s brilliant novel The Book Thief. We read it aloud everyday using skype and then wrote our own version of a Field Guide to Molching and published it on lulu.com. The day the books showed up, we were scheduled to have a skype call as we unwrapped the books together in each classroom. We wanted the kids to see each other as this event took place. And Skype failed. Skype was down for hours across wide swaths of the world.

2.) More importantly, Heather had worked hard to get in contact with Markus Zusak himself. Saying that he doesn’t usually do this kind of thing, he agreed to stay up until midnight in Australia and skype with our two classes. This was to be the highlight of the school year for my classroom. The culmination of months of work and the chance to meet this talented author. Every student in my class arrived an hour early for school. We were making an event out of it, calling it “Breakfast with Markus Zusak.” The kids brought all kinds of food. When the appointed hour arrived – no skype service for us. We worked desperately on our end, even finding a tech geek at our division office who was in working early who stood on his head to try to get the service up and running for us. All to no avail. The kids in my classroom were hugely disappointed to say the least. Lots of kids hanging their heads. More frustrating was the fact that the service worked fine an hour after we needed it.

This is the frustration felt by teachers starting off with technology and then things not working out for them. This is the reason that people are reluctant to jump on board. While I am not swearing off using technology in my classroom by any means, I’m frustrated, I’m angry, I’m sad for the kids in my classroom who worked so many hours for this day. And then things didn’t work.

Once this process finished, we moved into collaborative writing mode where each day students worked in small groups on google docs to work on writing a field guide to Molching, the fictional town at the centre of The Book Thief, the novel we had read. Once again, students talked on skype, worked in chatrooms and used a number of tools to pull together an guide book that was 85 pages long. We pulled all of their pictures and writing together and moved over to Lulu.com where we published the entire thing. (You can order a physical copy if you want. The entire piece is also available here as a free pdf)

This process took months. We started reading the novel in November and didn’t finish writing the our book until May. While we didn’t work every day together due to scheduling conflicts, snow days, ice days, professional development, etc., etc we did take many hours of classroom time to completed this process.

And I don’t regret a single one.

The looks on the faces of the students when the boxes were opened and the real, physical books came out, was worth every moment of frustration.

But more than that, after seventeen years of teaching, this process taught me more about reading and writing using new tools than any other project in the past.

1.) Writing has been a solitary action in the past only because this was the only mode available. When authors sat down with a pen and paper to write a novel or a poem, they were by themselves simply because only one person could physically occupy the space of a piece of paper at one time. But having a small group of students collaborate on a single piece of writing, no matter if they are 2 700 kms apart, has changed my thoughts on this. There is great power in having students work together to make a single sentence just right. There is power in having them set roles in a chat room and then work together, day after day, on document after document, to build something together. Writing, revising and then editing a single document together teaches students about good writing.

2.) Reading aloud makes a lot of things happen. We read this book aloud to two classrooms full of students each day over skype. While one of us was reading, the other worked in a backchannel with all of the students in it. We posed questions for them about what they were hearing, but mostly, we took part as one of them. We listened along as they did. We responded ourselves to what we were hearing. We cried and laughed along with them. We marvelled at the hundreds of comments that scrolled by in chatrooms every single day. We learned that when we read to students, while they often look passive, sitting in a desk listening to the story as it flows by them, there is endless possibilities going on inside of them. At the end of each day’s reading, we had the students post a response on a sticky wall. Again, sometimes we let a question for them, but often we just looked to them for their responses. We were often amazed at what we found.

3.) Its’s all about the connection. We had days where we couldn’t connect. Skype broke down on us several times. Snow days and ice days saw Heather and I exchanging messages before the school day began. Professional development days interrupted schedules. Trips and travels left students with substitute teachers who had no idea of how we were doing what we were doing. But through all this, the kids would comment: “we missed you yesterday. How are you?” We’d bug each other about hockey scores. Our cold weather in Snow Lake became a constant source of amazement for students in much warmer Southern Ontario, while their early spring left us jealous. Each day, bit by bit, with each piece of information, call, blog post and comment, we gres into a learning community. Students showed up in chatrooms when they were travelling or home from school sick. They wanted to be there.

4.) Watching kids write is cool. Writing with a group of kids on a google doc is amazing. Blank documents surrounded by ideas in chatrooms soon filled up with brainstormed thoughts. The formatting changed to notes as they researched. Finally, some enterprising student would step up and begin writing a first draft. Others would chime in, add new paragraphs and pieces. Others would start revising and soon a document emerged. You just can’t do this stuff on paper. We simply didn’t have access to this kind of information. New tools bring us new understandings of how things happen.

Many steps. Many hours. Great learning for students. Great learning for teachers. This is the stuff that classrooms can be about.

As much as I love this online space, I freely admit that I prefer to spend my time between the pages of a book.

I just can’t get into reading from a screen.

I’ve spent the last few days deep down in the pages of The Book Thief. My new friend Heather Durnin told me about it. I’m glad she did.

I’ve recommended few books over the time I’ve been writing here: Cathy’s Book, the Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and possibly a few others; but The Book Thief will change you. Seen through the eyes of Death, it is the fictional story of a young girl living in Germany during World War II. A girl learning about the power of words and small deeds. Deeds which remind us all what it means to be human. It is the most powerful piece of writing I’ve read in a long time.